hillary hartley dot com

In the spirit of the attention economy, I thought it might be useful to curate the back-story of BCC DIY for my eGovernment friends.

After learning that the city of Birmingham (UK) spent $2.8 million on a site that didn’t have basic web features such as RSS and the ability to quickly and easily pay for popular city services, Stefan Lewandowski decided to take matters into his own hands.  In approximately 24 hours BCC DIY was launched with a mix of screen-scraped council information, RSS feeds, and integrated third party services like FixMyStreet and Planning Alerts.

Starting with a wiki and a hack day, a group of concerned coders, designers, and web aficionados took Stefan’s initial site and built a fully community-generated version of the Birmingham City Council website.

BCC DIY - Stef Lewandowski explains how it all started from Alex Gamela on Vimeo.

For your browsing pleasure:

• Why build a new site for Birmingham City Council?
• BCC DIY Hack Day collected memory
• Archive of BCC DIY-related posts at Stefan Lewandowski’s site
• The BCC DIY development wiki
• The BCCDIY project on Github
• There’s been a lot of noise on Twitter under the hashtag #bccdiy
• The twain shall meet — early post on the story by @bern.
• More hack day videos from Paul Hartley and Jon Hickman.
• BCC DIY Hack Day on Eventbrite.